Two Embedded Maintainers for the Linux Kernel

Kernel 2.6 maintainer Andrew Morton's wish has come true now that he has found not just one, but two new embedded maintainers, Paul Gortmaker and David Woodhouse.

At the Embedded Linux Conference in Mountain View in April, Morton announced that he was looking for a maintainer for the kernel's embedded code (see the separate news item here). The maintainer's job would involve an architecture independent appraisal of the embedded code and generally keeping the code in good working order. "Things can and do break." Morton said at the time, adding that Linux was becoming increasingly important on mobile devices.

Besides the two maintainers for the job, there is also a kernel mailing list to match at "linux-embedded@vger.kernel.org". Both maintainers are well-known in the Community: Paul Gortmaker works for Wind River and maintained the real time clock driver and network adapters with the 8390 chip. David Woodhouse previously maintained the Flash filesystem JFFS2 which is used on NAND Flash memory.

The smallest kernel, put together thanks to a collection of patches by the Linux-tiny project, weighs in at just 197KB. After two years of inactivity, maintainers Michael Opdenacker and other developers are looking to breath new life into the project.